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A man opens the LinkedIn social network app on his smartphone at the breakfast table in Berlin on July 5, 2024.

Alicia Windzio | Picture Alliance | Getty Images

Every morning, Emily Ritter spends 15 minutes in bed checking her Instagram, Messages, Slack and Strava apps and playing The New York Times’ Connections and Strands games on her phone. Recently, LinkedIn has been part of the mix.

Ritter, a marketing executive at San Francisco-based startup Front, discovered a logic puzzle called Queens about two months ago through a promotion on LinkedIn, which is best known as the place where professionals connect and recruiters find talent.

“It’s just kind of a fun brainteaser,” Ritter said. “It’s a way to do something sort of relaxing, but in an engaging way.”

LinkedIn, which Microsoft acquired for $27 billion in 2016, rolled out its first three games in May, and Queens has emerged as the hottest of the trio.

On Tuesday, the company launches game number four, and it’s going deeper into logic puzzles with a title called Tango. In the game, a user is presented with a grid, and a few squares are filled in with a sun or a moon. It’s up to the player to fill in each remaining square with a sun or a moon, based on a few rules.

While LinkedIn consistently ranks as a top 100 app on iOS in the U.S., it’s below other social apps like TikTok, Reddit, Snapchat and X as well as Meta services such as Facebook and Instagram, according to industry researcher Sensor Tower.

Games represent a form of content that, when done right, keep people coming back. And it’s a market that Microsoft knows well. The company introduced its first Xbox console in 2001, and now has a games business generating $22 billion in annual revenue following the purchase of Activision Blizzard a year ago.

Yet gaming wasn’t a part of LinkedIn for the first seven years after the acquisition, which was Microsoft’s biggest ever until the Activision deal. Daniel Roth, LinkedIn’s editor-in-chief, says the games are designed to be played a little bit each day, perhaps when the day begins or as a short interlude between projects. Hopefully, they’ll spark conversations with colleagues and industry peers.

“You start with your game score and you move on to other areas,” Roth said.

It’s a familiar model. The New York Times offers eight games, and made a splash in the market in 2022 with the purchase of viral word game Wordle. The newspaper publisher saw tens of millions of new users and added subscribers after the acquisition.

A giant reborn: Satya Nadella's decade as Microsoft CEO

LinkedIn, which generates revenue from recruiting services and advertising, isn’t planning to charge people to play its games, a spokesperson said. In the fiscal year that ended on June 30, LinkedIn generated $16 billion in revenue, or about 7% of Microsoft’s total.

The unit “continues to see accelerated member growth and record engagement,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told analysts on the company’s July earnings call, months after membership crossed the 1 billion mark.

LinkedIn has been busy this year. It has built artificial intelligence features to help job seekers and students of its online courses. It’s been bringing a TikTok-like video tab to the LinkedIn mobile app.

And LinkedIn released its eighth annual list of the top 50 large companies to work at in the U.S.

Fun is a key part of the best workplaces, whether it be through banter, recreational sports or a happy hour, said Lakshman Somasundaram, the LinkedIn product management director who leads up games.

“It’s not just meetings and documents,” he said. “It’s important to us that LinkedIn reflects what the world’s best workplaces feel like.”

In September, LinkedIn surveyed around 900 members, and 83% said it was their favorite game the site offered, the spokesperson said.

Queens requires players to drop one crown emoji in each row and one in each column of a grid, a format that’s “a little bit sudoku-like,” said Thomas Snyder, the game’s architect. Snyder, a scientist formerly with Freenome and Adaptive Biotechnologies, won the 2018 World Puzzle Championship.

‘Sooner give up my left arm’

Joe Weinman, a former AT&T executive in New Jersey, has solved Queens for 46 days in a row. His streak would be at 90, but he forgot to play one day, he said in a LinkedIn message.

“I’d sooner give up my left arm than give up Queens,” he wrote, adding that he used to be on LinkedIn once a week.

And now there’s a place for Weinman and other addicts to congregate. In July Somasundaram started posting daily videos that reveal solutions to Queens puzzles on a dedicated page for the game. The videos garner hundreds of comments.

Somasundaram said he plans to produce videos about Tango.

Ritter has watched some of the Queens videos. She said she’s learned how to get through the puzzles relatively quickly.

“I guess I have just sort of figured out some of the tricks,” Ritter wrote in a LinkedIn message, adding that she would probably enjoy new challenging games.

When LinkedIn decided to launch a new logic game, employees came up with a few principles and brought them to Snyder. He sent back samples, and LinkedIn team members suggested additions, said LinkedIn games editor Paolo Pasco, who has constructed crossword puzzles for The New York Times.

In Tango, the objective is to get each row and column of the grid to have the same number of suns and moons. No more than two of a kind can be next to each other vertically or horizontally. An equal sign between two squares means the two must be the same, and an X between them requires the symbols to be opposites.

It’s a simple concept, but the puzzles get harder as the week progresses, just like The New York Times’ crossword puzzle.

LinkedIn promotes its games on its homepage and in the app’s My Network tab. But 40% of the people who play come in through a link, which might have been shared in a conversation or a post. After completing a game, LinkedIn makes it easy to copy your score and a link so you can send the information to connections or publish a post.

Between the links and the daily videos, people are coming back for more. LinkedIn’s App Store ranking tends to dip on the weekends, according to Sensor Tower, suggesting less usage when people aren’t at work.

“Professionals are playing games regularly, even on the weekends,” the spokesperson said.

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New data shows the labor market may not be as resilient as previously thought: LinkedIn's Kantega

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How Elon Musk’s plan to slash government agencies and regulation may benefit his empire

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How Elon Musk’s plan to slash government agencies and regulation may benefit his empire

Elon Musk’s business empire is sprawling. It includes electric vehicle maker Tesla, social media company X, artificial intelligence startup xAI, computer interface company Neuralink, tunneling venture Boring Company and aerospace firm SpaceX. 

Some of his ventures already benefit tremendously from federal contracts. SpaceX has received more than $19 billion from contracts with the federal government, according to research from FedScout. Under a second Trump presidency, more lucrative contracts could come its way. SpaceX is on track to take in billions of dollars annually from prime contracts with the federal government for years to come, according to FedScout CEO Geoff Orazem.

Musk, who has frequently blamed the government for stifling innovation, could also push for less regulation of his businesses. Earlier this month, Musk and former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy were tapped by Trump to lead a government efficiency group called the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.

In a recent commentary piece in the Wall Street Journal, Musk and Ramaswamy wrote that DOGE will “pursue three major kinds of reform: regulatory rescissions, administrative reductions and cost savings.” They went on to say that many existing federal regulations were never passed by Congress and should therefore be nullified, which President-elect Trump could accomplish through executive action. Musk and Ramaswamy also championed the large-scale auditing of agencies, calling out the Pentagon for failing its seventh consecutive audit. 

“The number one way Elon Musk and his companies would benefit from a Trump administration is through deregulation and defanging, you know, giving fewer resources to federal agencies tasked with oversight of him and his businesses,” says CNBC technology reporter Lora Kolodny.

To learn how else Elon Musk and his companies may benefit from having the ear of the president-elect watch the video.

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Why X’s new terms of service are driving some users to leave Elon Musk’s platform

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Why X's new terms of service are driving some users to leave Elon Musk's platform

Elon Musk attends the America First Policy Institute gala at Mar-A-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, Nov. 14, 2024.

Carlos Barria | Reuters

X’s new terms of service, which took effect Nov. 15, are driving some users off Elon Musk’s microblogging platform. 

The new terms include expansive permissions requiring users to allow the company to use their data to train X’s artificial intelligence models while also making users liable for as much as $15,000 in damages if they use the platform too much. 

The terms are prompting some longtime users of the service, both celebrities and everyday people, to post that they are taking their content to other platforms. 

“With the recent and upcoming changes to the terms of service — and the return of volatile figures — I find myself at a crossroads, facing a direction I can no longer fully support,” actress Gabrielle Union posted on X the same day the new terms took effect, while announcing she would be leaving the platform.

“I’m going to start winding down my Twitter account,” a user with the handle @mplsFietser said in a post. “The changes to the terms of service are the final nail in the coffin for me.”

It’s unclear just how many users have left X due specifically to the company’s new terms of service, but since the start of November, many social media users have flocked to Bluesky, a microblogging startup whose origins stem from Twitter, the former name for X. Some users with new Bluesky accounts have posted that they moved to the service due to Musk and his support for President-elect Donald Trump.

Bluesky’s U.S. mobile app downloads have skyrocketed 651% since the start of November, according to estimates from Sensor Tower. In the same period, X and Meta’s Threads are up 20% and 42%, respectively. 

X and Threads have much larger monthly user bases. Although Musk said in May that X has 600 million monthly users, market intelligence firm Sensor Tower estimates X had 318 million monthly users as of October. That same month, Meta said Threads had nearly 275 million monthly users. Bluesky told CNBC on Thursday it had reached 21 million total users this week.

Here are some of the noteworthy changes in X’s new service terms and how they compare with those of rivals Bluesky and Threads.

Artificial intelligence training

X has come under heightened scrutiny because of its new terms, which say that any content on the service can be used royalty-free to train the company’s artificial intelligence large language models, including its Grok chatbot.

“You agree that this license includes the right for us to (i) provide, promote, and improve the Services, including, for example, for use with and training of our machine learning and artificial intelligence models, whether generative or another type,” X’s terms say.

Additionally, any “user interactions, inputs and results” shared with Grok can be used for what it calls “training and fine-tuning purposes,” according to the Grok section of the X app and website. This specific function, though, can be turned off manually. 

X’s terms do not specify whether users’ private messages can be used to train its AI models, and the company did not respond to a request for comment.

“You should only provide Content that you are comfortable sharing with others,” read a portion of X’s terms of service agreement.

Though X’s new terms may be expansive, Meta’s policies aren’t that different. 

The maker of Threads uses “information shared on Meta’s Products and services” to get its training data, according to the company’s Privacy Center. This includes “posts or photos and their captions.” There is also no direct way for users outside of the European Union to opt out of Meta’s AI training. Meta keeps training data “for as long as we need it on a case-by-case basis to ensure an AI model is operating appropriately, safely and efficiently,” according to its Privacy Center. 

Under Meta’s policy, private messages with friends or family aren’t used to train AI unless one of the users in a chat chooses to share it with the models, which can include Meta AI and AI Studio.

Bluesky, which has seen a user growth surge since Election Day, doesn’t do any generative AI training. 

“We do not use any of your content to train generative AI, and have no intention of doing so,” Bluesky said in a post on its platform Friday, confirming the same to CNBC as well.

Liquidated damages

Bluesky CEO: Our platform is 'radically different' from anything else in social media

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The Pentagon’s battle inside the U.S. for control of a new Cyber Force

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The Pentagon's battle inside the U.S. for control of a new Cyber Force

A recent Chinese cyber-espionage attack inside the nation’s major telecom networks that may have reached as high as the communications of President-elect Donald Trump and Vice President-elect J.D. Vance was designated this week by one U.S. senator as “far and away the most serious telecom hack in our history.”

The U.S. has yet to figure out the full scope of what China accomplished, and whether or not its spies are still inside U.S. communication networks.

“The barn door is still wide open, or mostly open,” Senator Mark Warner of Virginia and chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee told the New York Times on Thursday.

The revelations highlight the rising cyberthreats tied to geopolitics and nation-state actor rivals of the U.S., but inside the federal government, there’s disagreement on how to fight back, with some advocates calling for the creation of an independent federal U.S. Cyber Force. In September, the Department of Defense formally appealed to Congress, urging lawmakers to reject that approach.

Among one of the most prominent voices advocating for the new branch is the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a national security think tank, but the issue extends far beyond any single group. In June, defense committees in both the House and Senate approved measures calling for independent evaluations of the feasibility to create a separate cyber branch, as part of the annual defense policy deliberations.

Drawing on insights from more than 75 active-duty and retired military officers experienced in cyber operations, the FDD’s 40-page report highlights what it says are chronic structural issues within the U.S. Cyber Command (CYBERCOM), including fragmented recruitment and training practices across the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines.

“America’s cyber force generation system is clearly broken,” the FDD wrote, citing comments made in 2023 by then-leader of U.S. Cyber Command, Army General Paul Nakasone, who took over the role in 2018 and described current U.S. military cyber organization as unsustainable: “All options are on the table, except the status quo,” Nakasone had said.

Concern with Congress and a changing White House

The FDD analysis points to “deep concerns” that have existed within Congress for a decade — among members of both parties — about the military being able to staff up to successfully defend cyberspace. Talent shortages, inconsistent training, and misaligned missions, are undermining CYBERCOM’s capacity to respond effectively to complex cyber threats, it says. Creating a dedicated branch, proponents argue, would better position the U.S. in cyberspace. The Pentagon, however, warns that such a move could disrupt coordination, increase fragmentation, and ultimately weaken U.S. cyber readiness.

As the Pentagon doubles down on its resistance to establishment of a separate U.S. Cyber Force, the incoming Trump administration could play a significant role in shaping whether America leans toward a centralized cyber strategy or reinforces the current integrated framework that emphasizes cross-branch coordination.

Known for his assertive national security measures, Trump’s 2018 National Cyber Strategy emphasized embedding cyber capabilities across all elements of national power and focusing on cross-departmental coordination and public-private partnerships rather than creating a standalone cyber entity. At that time, the Trump’s administration emphasized centralizing civilian cybersecurity efforts under the Department of Homeland Security while tasking the Department of Defense with addressing more complex, defense-specific cyber threats. Trump’s pick for Secretary of Homeland Security, South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, has talked up her, and her state’s, focus on cybersecurity.

Former Trump officials believe that a second Trump administration will take an aggressive stance on national security, fill gaps at the Energy Department, and reduce regulatory burdens on the private sector. They anticipate a stronger focus on offensive cyber operations, tailored threat vulnerability protection, and greater coordination between state and local governments. Changes will be coming at the top of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which was created during Trump’s first term and where current director Jen Easterly has announced she will leave once Trump is inaugurated.

Cyber Command 2.0 and the U.S. military

John Cohen, executive director of the Program for Countering Hybrid Threats at the Center for Internet Security, is among those who share the Pentagon’s concerns. “We can no longer afford to operate in stovepipes,” Cohen said, warning that a separate cyber branch could worsen existing silos and further isolate cyber operations from other critical military efforts.

Cohen emphasized that adversaries like China and Russia employ cyber tactics as part of broader, integrated strategies that include economic, physical, and psychological components. To counter such threats, he argued, the U.S. needs a cohesive approach across its military branches. “Confronting that requires our military to adapt to the changing battlespace in a consistent way,” he said.

In 2018, CYBERCOM certified its Cyber Mission Force teams as fully staffed, but concerns have been expressed by the FDD and others that personnel were shifted between teams to meet staffing goals — a move they say masked deeper structural problems. Nakasone has called for a CYBERCOM 2.0, saying in comments early this year “How do we think about training differently? How do we think about personnel differently?” and adding that a major issue has been the approach to military staffing within the command.

Austin Berglas, a former head of the FBI’s cyber program in New York who worked on consolidation efforts inside the Bureau, believes a separate cyber force could enhance U.S. capabilities by centralizing resources and priorities. “When I first took over the [FBI] cyber program … the assets were scattered,” said Berglas, who is now the global head of professional services at supply chain cyber defense company BlueVoyant. Centralization brought focus and efficiency to the FBI’s cyber efforts, he said, and it’s a model he believes would benefit the military’s cyber efforts as well. “Cyber is a different beast,” Berglas said, emphasizing the need for specialized training, advancement, and resource allocation that isn’t diluted by competing military priorities.

Berglas also pointed to the ongoing “cyber arms race” with adversaries like China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. He warned that without a dedicated force, the U.S. risks falling behind as these nations expand their offensive cyber capabilities and exploit vulnerabilities across critical infrastructure.

Nakasone said in his comments earlier this year that a lot has changed since 2013 when U.S. Cyber Command began building out its Cyber Mission Force to combat issues like counterterrorism and financial cybercrime coming from Iran. “Completely different world in which we live in today,” he said, citing the threats from China and Russia.

Brandon Wales, a former executive director of the CISA, said there is the need to bolster U.S. cyber capabilities, but he cautions against major structural changes during a period of heightened global threats.

“A reorganization of this scale is obviously going to be disruptive and will take time,” said Wales, who is now vice president of cybersecurity strategy at SentinelOne.

He cited China’s preparations for a potential conflict over Taiwan as a reason the U.S. military needs to maintain readiness. Rather than creating a new branch, Wales supports initiatives like Cyber Command 2.0 and its aim to enhance coordination and capabilities within the existing structure. “Large reorganizations should always be the last resort because of how disruptive they are,” he said.

Wales says it’s important to ensure any structural changes do not undermine integration across military branches and recognize that coordination across existing branches is critical to addressing the complex, multidomain threats posed by U.S. adversaries. “You should not always assume that centralization solves all of your problems,” he said. “We need to enhance our capabilities, both defensively and offensively. This isn’t about one solution; it’s about ensuring we can quickly see, stop, disrupt, and prevent threats from hitting our critical infrastructure and systems,” he added.

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